Historically, residential gateways provided a routing function from an in-home Local Area Network (LAN) to a Wide Area Network (WAN) based Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) connection. Bandwidth available from the WAN ranged from 200 kbps to 6 Mbps. The LAN side of the gateway was either a single or multiple 10/100Bt Ethernet connections serving client computers. Eventually, these Ethernet connections were replaced with wireless IEEE 802.11b/a/g LANs operating from 6 to 50 Mbps. The smaller bandwidth capabilities of the WAN versus the LAN kept downstream traffic flow simple in the gateway. Upstream traffic from the LAN to WAN was seldom an issue because users were less sensitive to this bottleneck. A typical upstream bottleneck scenario would be sending an email with a large attachment. In this situation, the Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) service of the gateway would simply throttle the LAN connection to the appropriate speed for the WAN.
With the advent of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks, the traditional scenario described above has been reversed. In a FTTH network, a high speed FTTH data connection is provided to the residential gateway. The FTTH data connection provides data rates in the range of 1 to 10 Gbps. In contrast, the proposed IEEE 802.11n standard for wireless LANs provides data rates in the range of 100 to 500 Mbps. As such, the traditional residential gateway architecture will limit overall performance to the wireless LAN bandwidth, thereby negating much of the value of the FTTH connection. Thus, there is a need for an improved residential gateway architecture for interconnecting a high speed WAN to a lower speed wireless LAN.